As Crackdown Begins on Bus Fare Evaders, MTA Should be Embarrassed It Took So Long
The agency said it was losing $315 million in bus fare evaders and that close to half the riders, some 48 percent, were skipping out on paying.
| 30 Aug 2024 | 01:11
The MTA Eagle team and the NYPD began a crackdown on fare evaders, handing out $100 tickets to anyone it caught skipping out on the $2.90 bus fare. The MTA data said the agency $315 million a year in lost bus fares as nearly half the bus riders skipped out on paying. (
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A few years ago, in these very pages, I wrote a story asking whether I was a hero or a sucker for doggedly paying my bus fare in the city.
Think about it. Why the heck should anybody fork over the $2.90 for the bus fare –or $1.45 for senior citizens?
Until the recent crackdown began, there was practically no downside to breaking the law. The MTA does not encourage New Yorkers and tourists to do the right thing. Have you ever seen someone get a ticket? I have. And you can count the number of times on one hand during my decades of living in Manhattan. The New York Times detailed how police led a woman in scrubs off a bus and issued her a $100 ticket after an undercover inspector flagged her. The Times said she paid the next time.
The MTA recently said that nearly half the riders–48 percent of those who rode the buses in the first quarter of this year–failed to pay. That amounts to losses of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. In 2022, the MTA said Metropolitan Transportation Authority said turnstile jumpers on subways cost the agency $285 million but even though there were fewer riders, bus fare evaders resulted in $315 million on buses.
As the New York Times pointed out, the incidents compute to being one million bus rides every weekday. The epidemic of cheaters is getting worse, too.
The MTA data said that as recently as 2018, only 18 percent of bus riders were skipping out on the fare.
The M.T.A. has a lot to answer for. The subway system is widely regarded as a place of worry. Now, the main question is whether you’ll get to your destination safely. Will you be hassled or worse while riding on the subway?
Regarding the buses, the passive stance of the M.T.A. in corralling the bus fares in the past was shameful. As someone who religiously paid my fare, I sometimes feel like an idiot for being an upright citizen while so many people were taking advantage of the system without any consequences. Did I feel like a sucker? You betcha.
The M.T.A. counters critics like me by insisting that fare inspectors are enforcing the rules and on Aug. 29 in Manhattan, the NYPD and the MTA spread out across Manhattan to catch fare evaders.
I know, I know. By writing this piece, I sound a little like the annoying kid in your middle-school classroom who reminds the teacher to assign homework. The easy thing to do is to perpetuate the conspiracy and let everyone stick it to the man and not pay the fare.
There are so many things wrong with our fair city. When we compound the disappointments of city life what seems dangerously close to out and out mismanagement, the ill combination is lethal.
I don’t get it. We have access to the innovative minds of city planners from the finest universities in the nation. And the best they can come up with is to pledge to act more diligently when monitoring the acts of random miscreants. But these are not actually petty offenders when you add up their take. They are criminals.
People who habitually offend city life by brazenly disrgarding bus fares are small-time crooks. They’re not urban heroes. We should not look the other way. We have to start somewhere. The crackdown that supposedly began recently cannot be a short term or one-time thing.